Amigurumi Reveal: Alton Brown Good Eats Inspired Chicken

A few weeks ago I showed off this giant sphere I crocheted and said it was going to be the base of an amigurumi for Jeff.  Well, here is the finished product.  It's a jumbo size chicken!

Why?  Well, Jeff and I have a foodie crush on Alton Brown and his show Good Eats.  I tried to paper mache a chicken like the one he uses as a prop on the show a long time ago and it turns out I am just not a good paper crafter.  I decided crochet was the next best thing(at least for me) and set to work.

First, I collected some pictures to use as inspiration, but it wasn't easy to find them.  It turns out this chicken was a Department 56 item (which originally had a parachute attached to it) which sold some time ago and is now super rare.  There weren't a ton of pictures to find, but here are the sites where I found the ones I used:

• Worthpoint: Department 56 Parachuting Chicken
• The Tabacchi Papers - Dixie Chicken
• Good Eats Fan Page
• Alton Brown's Instagram

Next, I made the giant sphere and constructed the rest of the pieces to attach to it.  This took me quite a while and I took at least a week or two of frustration breaks because I was not making any forward progress.  I finally found my crochet mojo again last week and got down to business.  I am beyond happy the chicken is complete!

Unfortunately, I'm not very fond of how this all came out.  I told Jeff I was disappointed that the chicken didn't look exactly like I wanted and that it took me so long because I was constantly ripping out rows to get the parts to look even halfway right.  He reminded me that Albert Einstein said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”  I think I'm going to have to adopt that as my amigurumi design motto.

Coming up, a "normal" size chicken that is more true to the original!  Stay tuned and of course...

Fry some more!